Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The Arnold children of Michigan Hill, Thurston County, Western Washington, August 1939. The oldest boy earned the money to buy his bicycle. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.

Art historian Jordan Bear has interesting piece in Bookforum on two new books about photographer Dorothea Lange. Here's an excerpt I found particularly interesting:

Of Walker Evans, the preeminent American documentarian, with whose work Lange’s would be constantly—and nearly always unfavorably—compared, she claimed, “He doesn’t go any closer than just so far . . . which can be a man’s strength.” By contrast, she said of herself, “I can never go close enough . . . I push close. It’s right for me.” Lange cast herself and Evans as representing the outer markers of documentary photography: Where Evans was detached, indifferent, even unfeeling, she was engaged, politically and emotionally, with her subjects, evincing her own, very different kind of strength....

And:

Linda Gordon’s biography Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits...emphasizes the similarity of Lange to the responsible historian: Both produce representations that aspire to accuracy but acknowledge the inherent limitations of that pursuit. The available choices in cropping, posing, emphasis, and scale are not, Gordon claims, “so different from historians’ decisions in writing books or lesson plans.” Even in Lange’s most penetrating portraits, Gordon postulates, there remains an impervious stratum that prevents complete understanding, an outer shell that protects the agency of even the abject sitter. As close as Lange might “push,” her pictures never presume to know the entirety of what they show. And this, to Gordon’s mind, is one of the great strengths of the photographs, for it demonstrates that Lange’s notion of the documentary mode was self-critical and democratic, rejecting the fantasy of omniscience and embracing the sanctity of privacy available to even the wretched among us.